You might think I’m antagonistic towards
vegetarians. I really am not. Really.
I just like defending carnivores.
Anyways, there was a contest not too long ago in the NY Times to defend
the ethics of eating meat. 600 word
limit. I didn’t expect to win, but it
sure was annoying when one of the winning essays basically said eating meat was
fine because we can now grow it in petri dishes. Not only an absurd conclusion, but downright
revolting. Well, here’s my entry.
To
address the fundamental question of whether eating meat, in and of itself, is
ethical, we must discard the inappropriate and woefully inadequate ethical
frameworks of religion and civil rights.
Nothing defines what part a species plays in an ecosystem more than what
that species eats. Therefore any ethical
discussion concerning what categories of food we eat will be rendered absurd
unless it is placed smack dab in the context of ecology. Carnivores have been around long before
civilization, industrialization, religion, humankind, and certainly well before
the concept of ethics. To insist that it
is a different question for humans to eat meat at this juncture of our
historical situation is to fall into the long held illusion that we have
somehow stepped out of Nature and need to think through what our posture to
Nature should be. Only in this
schizophrenic posturing could we, as a species, systematically poison, pollute,
deforest, and literally trash our own life-sustaining home that we have so
abstractly labeled Nature. And with the
same haughtiness that we have devastated the environment around us, we turn and
insist that we have risen above the animals and are morally obligated to
abstain from eating meat.
Flesh
can only be ripped out of its natural context when a culture has sanitized and
alienated itself from its food sources and interacts with meat only in small
cellophane-wrapped, refrigerated, government-approved packages. If we must impose the human construct of
ethics onto Nature, then in order to do the least damage, we need to see the
consumption of flesh through the lens of what is most healthy and vibrant for
the ecosystems around us.
Both
evolution and creation stories speak of the progression from vegetation to
animals. This was a ‘quantum’ leap both
up the food chain and in ecological diversity and health. Once the herbivores, the ruminants, even the
algae eating fish came onto the scene, suddenly green plants were being
converted to flesh and a system of flesh that returned much of the nutritional
energy back to the earth in the form of manure.
This in turn allowed the vegetation to flourish in a much greater
capacity than it had when it was not being eaten. To proceed further up the food chain to
carnivores is to diversify even more and take yet another leap in the health of
an ecosystem. We are aware of the
importance of keystone predatory species, sadly, because in their absence we
have witnessed the breakdown of ecosystems.
Whether it is the otters keeping the sea urchins in check so that the
kelp forests are not destroyed, or the wolves hunting the hooved ungulates and
thus preserving the health and diversity of riparian ecosystems, the act of
eating one another is Nature’s currency of keeping her ‘economy’ healthy.
When we put the issue of eating
meat in the context of the ecosystems around us, it becomes clear that it is
nothing short of arrogance to consider our species as separate from and more
enlightened than the rhythms of nature around us and thus decreeing that the
consumption of meat, in and of itself, is unethical. Such arrogance, in fact, is kin to the hubris
that has led us to treat the environment and the animals around us in such
devastating and repulsive ways. If we
ever manage to work through our schizophrenia to re-assimilate with the world
in which we eat, breathe, procreate and live, we may actually find a moral
imperative to eat meat in an ecologically mindful way as an antidote to our
species’ insanity.
Petri dish sludge, anyone?
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